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It’s a perfect storm: New baby. Sleep deprivation. Unsolicited advice. Short maternity leave. Pressure. In-laws. Baby gear. Childcare. Dr. Google. Facebook.
As if new parenting isn’t hard enough—it just got harder.
For almost a decade, I’ve been watching the parenting channel. Sitting in circles of 10 moms (a total of 150-200 women each week), connecting them to each other as they navigate the uncharted waters from bump to baby through the longest and most challenging transition that they have ever experienced—sharing, laughing, and connecting in our church, our temple of sanity.
We are committed to finding balance, committed to figuring this out—so why is it so damn hard?
Compliments of culture, in 2016, the name of the game is speed, and our babies haven’t gotten the memo. There may be an app to keep track how often you breastfeed, but no app to breastfeed. Uber delivers cars, and Seamless delivers food—but who delivers accurate information? The information that tells you what you need, when you need it? Who are the role models, the guiding lights? Generations past had the simplicity of family nearby or a “circle of cousins” and the dog-eared pages of the Dr. Spock baby book our parents treasured. To add to the fire, the moment our babies are born, most moms have 12 weeks (a United States phenomena) before having to hand over their babies. The pressure is on, and our clocks are ticking.
It’s not us failing as moms, it’s the culture failing at curating.
The new baby challenges remain the same since the groups began, the way we process those challenges are vastly different. Breastfeeding is harder, getting our babies to sleep is harder, returning to work is harder, being a stay-at-home mom is harder. Our perspectives have shifted because life is easier. And the noise is louder, often unbearable, because everyone is talking, everybody is saying different things at the same time, with conflicting pieces of advice.
So I ask: “Who is the proverbial Simon?”
“Simon Says,” the popular schoolyard game, was the classic follow-the-leader exercise, one person in charge (at a time), with a linear set of instructions from the leader that one would follow. As long as it was prefaced with “Simon Says” and you followed, you were on the path of success. When that round was over, you would follow another leader—simple as that.
Before the information superhighway, the “Simon” role was clearly filled by pediatricians, vetted authors, and established professionals. In 2016, “Simon” can be falsely disguised as the mom with an agenda in your Facebook group, the “expert” that just put together a website last week, the baby nurse with no training, and many downright charlatans. Social media can become a classic game of Telephone, with a very bad connection—and the static has been increasing.
We now inhabit a world where everyone’s personal laptop will yield them different results on the same Google search; where Wikipedia (on which a 10-year-old can update the data of a nuclear physicist’s entry) is certainly not your
parents’ encyclopedia.
With thousands of parenting books, websites, and products on the market, it can be difficult to quiet the noise. It’s causing a dramatic shift in information overload and sending mothers astray—causing undue stress, anxiety, and indecision in the process.
Parenting before 2013 was a linear learning model, sprinkled with anecdotal advice from in-laws and family. Almost all advice was concerned about what was happening in the moment. Information was on a need-to-know basis, dispersed in small increments, much like a time release iron supplement—you got what you needed when you needed it.
Our culture has led us to overdose in toxic quantities—too much too soon. Crawl before you walk, walk before you run.
When you jump chapters, your intuition (which is really your greatest asset as a mother) isn’t able to fully develop. However, learning as you go along, on-the-job training, gaining confidence, and learning from a small group of other mothers is how all women parented in the centuries before the Internet.
Facebook in 2016 can be the modern day “Back to the Future” time-travel debacle, presenting ideas, people, places, and things out of context, before their time, or after their time—instead of at their right time. Parents can more easily transform, thrive, and commit to a new process when they choose the right time to do something.
During one of our sleep chats at The Moms Groups, we had a mom who had the only “sleeping through the night” baby in the room. Upon hearing this, suddenly all the other mothers got still, leaned in, stared intently, and listened for advice. A few women even reached into their diaper bags for paper and pen! She whispered: “First, at bedtime, I put on Norah Jones…” The moms all began scribbling “Norah Jones” as if that were the answer to the universe. I exclaimed: “It’s not about Norah Jones—it’s about the fact that this mom has a bedtime ‘first’!” Many bedtime routines will do, you just need to have a consistent bedtime routine.
Culture cultivates a need within us to chase all the shiny objects all at once. Success comes from finding reliable sources, committing to one path at a time, at the right time. It’s okay not to know, it’s okay to feel unsure, it’s okay to learn, and time is often the best remedy.
Final words of wisdom: Be wary of the word “expert.” After hosting 5,000 conversations, one circle at a time, I still do not find grand appeal with the word. Ever mother is the expert in her own life, her own family, and her own child.
Malcolm Gladwell said it best: After 10,000 hours of practice (that’s just about one year of parenting, and just about the time that we celebrate that we’ve got this and wipe our brow that we have a year under our belts) we may not always have the answers, but we have the toolkit—the instinct, intellect, and intuition—to figure it out. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Seven Tips for Quieting the Noise: Many new parents thrive through connection, education, and intuition. These seven tips for quieting the noise are a great place to begin!
- Trust your intuition
- Find your circle of friends
- Limit time on social media
- Know when to focus
- Know when to surrender
- Choose the right time to begin
- Commit to the process for at least a week
Renee Sullivan is a parent and lifestyle coach and founder of The Moms Groups, keeping moms sane in the insane world of parenting. To learn more, visit themomsgroups.com.
